The Beagleblog

has moved here.

Please update your blogrolls, bookmarks and favourites, tell your friends, colleagues and anyone who wants to see a replica HMS Beagle sailing the seas in 2009. This will remain as an archive, so if you have links here, they'll still work. And as I said in an earlier post, if you have blogged about us and are not our blogroll at our new home, leave a comment and it will be put right.

Visit the blog often, because as the Readers and Writers Blog says

the blog is extremely well written. Now believers in creationism and intelligent design, take note: Our interest in the blog is its writing and history, but be warned that the Beagle bloggers do gore your oxen.

and

Much of the rest of the blog also is written with a sense of humour, but with a serious devotion to Darwin and the tall ship replica that will celebrate him and his groundbreaking science.

We promise to gore creationist oxen with as much eloquence and humour as at our previous berth and to rouse the scientific, evolutionary masses to give Charles Darwin the 200th birthday he deserves, by building launching a replica HMS Beagle.

PS: Big science link up announcement coming very soon. Now bookmark our new blog address.

We get mail: what's with the puppet?

The puppet (below) was the idea (and dare I say creation?) of biologist blogger Miss Prism, who ran a blog and buy sale in aid for Beagle Project build funds. This caught the attention of PZ at Pharyngula, and the rush of bids resulted in Charles being relocated to the home of an Humblewoodcutter in Canada. Humble is an evolved homeschooler, and she recently got in touch to say that Charles Darwin now occupies pride of place in her house, where a recent visitor saw him and asked: 'Is that God?'
In her own words: 'Cue thigh slapping laughter.'

The red noticeboard (Darwin's first evolutionary scribbling were in a red notebook, also the title of the Friends of Charles Darwin weblog) was photoshopped onto MissPrism's original pic by me, and her guest post by Charles Robert Darwin is well worth a click. If anyone else has any great ideas for Beagle fundraising, let us know. (T-shirts are underway.)

Historians: welcome to the 2009 party!

The Journal of Victorian Studies is doing a 2009 special on 'Darwin and the evolution of Victorian studies', editor Jon Smith invites essays on

"all aspects of Darwin and Darwin studies in the Victorian period from scholars working in a range of areas, including history and history of science, literary and cultural criticism, art history, and history of the book."

and

investigations of Darwin's impact on previously overlooked areas (e.g., art and visual culture, psychology and the emotions), and new approaches to Darwinism's impact on Victorian attitudes to gender and courtship, race and empire, literature and publishing.

Well I'm delighted that historians are joining in the party and I'm sure they have much to contribute (some may even wish to sail with us), but as one who has a lot of Google alerts about Darwin and sees daily ranting, gibbering screeds blaming him for the misdeeds of Hitler, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Stalin, eugenics, the sky falling on Chicken Licken's head and the failure of the Second Coming, my heart sinks to see him being held responsible for how Victorians copped off with one another. That's a real can of worms.

That rumbling you hear outside Westminster Abbey (London, where the poor chap was buried against his wishes) isn't the traffic its poor old Charles spinning in his grave at the millions of hands tugging his great ideas and life's graft in their own preferred directions.

Hat-tip: The Dispersal of Darwin.

Have you blogged about The Beagle Project

and been miffed at the lack of your inclusion on a blogroll? Well, we'll shortly be migrating to a new home and there's blogroll up there. Do pop over and see if you are included, if not leave a comments or contact me though the Peter Mc profile email thang, and I'll unomit your omission.

The Guardian of science

Though it pains me to supersede Peter Mc's previous post highlighting our noted creationist ox-goring propensity and writing prowess, I just can't wait to show you the Guardian's shiny new science website. If its early days are any indication, it will be one for science enthusiasts of all stripes to keep at the top of their list of bookmarks.

Darwin is particularly well represented in recent blogs, but my favourite of all is this week's science podcast in which Ian McEwan explains why we should all love science. As McEwan says, "curiosity is one of the greatest of human attributes and science is codified curiosity."

There's also a Richard Dawkins podcast, a slide show of newly discovered Antarctic species, and an article on Craig Venter, the bad boy of genomics (and, more relevant for us, metagenomics).